1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer graphics and more specifically to a three-dimensional (3D) still and animated object representations obtained from photos of real-life objects and their geometrical representations, and to a representation and rendering method using a simplified geometrical model of an object.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the immediate future, high-quality rendering of 3D objects at interactive speed will receive the primary emphasis in modern graphic systems. The demand for high-quality rendering of 3D objects necessitates effective algorithms to be devised for compressing the objects and transmitting them via communications networks in such fields as electronic commerce, computer games, science, engineering, medicine. Use of traditional polygonal models of 3D objects during the last tens of years to simultaneously meet all these demands has failed to give the desired result. Polygonal models have two major shortcomings: large volume (e.g., realistic models require tens of million triangles) and difficulty of constructing. To overcome these difficulties, several approaches to 3D graphics have been suggested in recent years. The most advantageous of them seem to be methods based on images of objects, and methods based on points instead of triangles in 3D space.
Image-based methods represent the given object as a set of images—‘photos’ of the object—totally covering its visible surface, and taken from several different camera positions. Besides, each such image is accompanied with corresponding depth-map which is an array of distances from the pixels in the image plane to the object surface. An advantage of such a representation is that reference images can provide high quality of the object visualization regardless of its polygonal model complexity, and can be compressed by usual image compression techniques without sacrificing much quality. In addition, rendering time is proportional to the number of pixels in the reference and output images and not the object complexity.
Disadvantages are due to the fact that obtaining depth maps for real life objects (e.g., sculptures) is rather complicated operation, as well as to insufficiently developed techniques of handling such representations.
Point-based methods represent an object as a points cloud' without imposing explicit local polygonal structure. In this method, a set of depth images defines a set of points (having corresponding colors) on the object surface by translating each pixel of each reference image by the corresponding depth value in the direction orthogonal to the image plane. Hence image-based representations are a particular case of point-based representations. In the following we shall concentrate on image-based representations as they are closer to our approach.
In the literature, the two aforementioned trends are described in references [1] to [13] describing such 3D object representation and rendering methods, as Relief Textures Mapping [1], Layered Depth Images [2], Layered Depth Image Tree [3], Qsplat [4], Surfels [5] and some other that have been known in prior art. In the following discussion of the prior art approaches, references will be made to the following publications:
[1] Manuel M. Oliveira, Gary Bishop, David McAllister. Relief Textures Mapping, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '00;
[2] Jonathan Shade, Steven Gortler, Li-wei He, Richard Szeliski, Layered Depth Images, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '98;
[3] Chun-Fa Chang, Gary Bishop, Anselmo Lastra. LDI Tree: A Hierarchical Representation for Image-Based Rendering, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '99;
[4] Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Marc Levoy. QSplat: A Multiresolution Point Rendering System for Large Meshes, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '00;
[5] Hanspeter Pfister, Matthias Zwicker, Jeroen van Baar, Markus Gross. Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '00;
[6] Chamberlain et al., Fast Rendering of Complex Environments Using a Spatial Hierarchy, Proceedings of Graphics Interface '96;
[7] Grossman and Daily, Point sample rendering, Proceedings of Eurographics Workshops on Rendering Techniques '98;
[8] Lischinski and Rappoport, Image-Based Rendering for Non-Diffuse Synthetic Scenes, Proceedings of Eurographics Workshops on Rendering Techinques '98;
[9] M. Levoy and T. Whitted, The Use of Points as Display Primitives. Technical Report TR 85-022, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Computer Science, 1985;
[10] L. Westover, Footprint Evaluation for Volume Rendering, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '90;
[11] C. I. Connolly. Cumulative Generation of Octree Models from Range Data, Proceedings of Intl. Conf. Robotics, pp. 25-32, March 1984;
[12] G. H Tarbox and S. N. Gottschlich. IVIS: An Integrated Volumetric Inspection System, Proceedings of the 1994 Second CAD-Based Vision Workshop, pp. 220-227, February 1994;
[13] Curless, B., Levoy, M., A Volumetric Method for Building Complex Models from Range Images, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '96;
[14] C. Bregler, Video Based Animation Techniques for Human Motion, SIGGRAPH '00 Course 39: Image-based Modeling and Rendering; and
[15] Paul F. Debevec, Camillo J. Taylor, Jitendra Malik, Modeling and Rendering Architecture from Photographs: A Hybrid Geometry-and Image-based Approach, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '96.
The common problem with image-based methods is occurrence of holes in the resulting image. Unlike polygonal models that are ‘continuous’ in the sense that the object surface is linearly interpolated into the interior of all the polygons (normally, triangles), image-based and point-based representations provide ‘discrete’ approximations of the object. In case of image-based representations, object surface is, in fact, approximated with small colored squares, i.e. shifted pixels of reference images. When viewing direction differs substantially from the normal direction to each of the reference image planes, projections of the approximating squares generally do not completely cover the projection of the object surface. Let as call such holes the holes of the first type. Another source of holes in the resulting image for image-based representations is the fact that some parts of the surface may be not visible in all of the reference images, but become visible for some viewpoints (holes of the second type). These holes are due to insufficient information contained in a particular image-based representation.
Relief texture method [1] suppresses holes of the first type by using an analog of linear interpolation, which may lead to distortions and artifacts, since interpolation is performed in the 2-dimensional projection of the object rather than in 3D space.
More importantly, holes of the second type can only be treated the same way under this approach.
Layered depth images (LDI) [2] are data structure designed to avoid the problem with holes of the second type. LDI is an image whose pixels contain all the object points projecting to a fixed location in the reference image plane. Fast prewarping algorithm of [1] applies here as well. However, problems with holes of the first type remain. Splatting (first introduced in [10]) is used to solve the problem of holes of the first type. Splat is a small two-dimensional rectilinear or elliptical surface patch endowed with a certain color distribution—e.g. Gaussian centered at the center of the patch, or constant. Disadvantage of the LDI method is in its nonsymmetry since the representation is based on a projection in a certain fixed direction. This leads to difficulties with hole filling for viewing directions that are very different from said fixed direction.
LDI tree [3] is an octree with an LDI attached to each octree cell (node). The advantage of having a hierarchical model is that not every LDI in the octree should be rendered. Those cells that are farther away are rendered in less detail by using the filtered points that are stored in the LDIs higher in the hierarchy. This representation was devised in order to overcome the nonsymmetry of LDI by using many reference images. However, the storage space becomes very large: LDI tree for 512-by-512 image (obtained from 36 reference images) occupies 30 Mbytes as reported in [3], and about half this amount was the tree structure itself. As reported in [3], rendering time for this object is also large: 2-3 seconds per frame on Silicon Graphics Onyx2 with 32250 MHz MIPS R10000 processors (although parallelism was not used).
Yet another representation combining image-based data into a tree structure is recently designed Surfels method [5]. It deals with a specific tree [8] that is a layered-depth cube (LDC) where instead of a single LDI tree, nodes contain three LDI's corresponding to three orthogonal planes. Results reported in [5] were obtained for original model containing 81000 triangles. Frame rate of 11 frames per second (fps) for 256-by-256 output buffer was obtained on Pentium III 700 MHz processor. Surfels are reference image pixels shifted by a corresponding depth vector. The tree structure is used to speed up computations for choosing visible elements. Hole filling is achieved by nearest-neighbor or Gaussian filtering. Splatting is implemented in this structure. High quality of the resulting image is attained at the cost of data volume and speed restrictions.
Recently introduced representation of Qsplat [4] should also be mentioned, although it is rather point-based than image-based method. This approach uses hierarchical point structure based on nested balls. Elliptical splats of proper size are used at the rendering stage. However somewhat complicated and time-consuming truncated culling was used in [4]. The data structure is also more complex, and requires more time to process.
The idea and various implementation methods for obtaining octree structured 3D model with from range data such as sets of depth images were developed in [1]-[12]. [13] deals with a construction of polygonal model from original data using octree.
All the above relates to still 3D image-based representations. Speaking of animated 3D objects, it should be noted that only very few image-based methods were suggested for this problem so far. In [14] an idea of facial image modification for almost constant 3D face geometry is developed. This is applicable only to a restricted class of animated objects and is not animation of an actual 3D object. In [15] architectural scenes are animated with the aid of view-dependent texture mapping which reconstruct architectural views from various viewpoints on the base of a few photos.
So, it is clear that an image-based representation allowing compact storage, fast rendering with high output image quality, and suitable for animation purposes is needed.